Revisiting Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Revolution
(Review of two books by the Martinique and Algerian revolutionary, the late Frantz Fanon, by A. Langa, The African Communist, No. 25, Second Quarter 1966)
“… imperialism is not defeated when the national flag is unfurled and the nationalist government moves into State House. … Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they remove their flags and their police from our territories”.
– Frantz Fanon “The Wretched of the Earth”, 1961 –
REVOLUTION IS A GREAT CATALYST. It transforms vague motives and emotions into thoughts, policies, programmes; it pushes ideas towards the acid test of revolutionary action. For the vacillating, the undecided, revolution is a hard master-the revolutionaries have only one question to ask of him: are you my brother, or are you my foe?
In the revolution to which Frantz Fanon was so brutally introduced, it was perhaps easier to choose. In Algeria, there were none of the refinements, the masks, the subtleties, which reaction uses to cover its actions. The visible enemy of the Algerian people’s revolution was the para, the policeman, the colon, the beast of the O.A.S. (“Secret Army Organisation”). The invisible enemies, too, were well known to the Algerian people – the Paris government, the metropolitan banks and oil monopolies, the absentee landlords, the whole structure and might of French imperialism. The entire people was at war with the foreign
